


Your Face in Tomorrow

by WhenasInSilks



Category: Avengers (Comics), Iron Man (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremis Tony Stark, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Infidelity, Iron Man Vol. 4 (2005), Iron Man: Execute Program, M/M, Pre-Civil War (Marvel), Self-Destructive Behaviour/Ideation, Self-Hatred, Tony-centric, Transhumanism, but they do fuck, like I wouldn't call them a ship per se, some Tony/Maya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 03:55:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21155204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: You are lying on your back in a bed three thousand miles away from your home.You are ruining your life.(please mind the tags; more detailed warnings in the end notes)





	Your Face in Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [msermesth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/msermesth/gifts).

> For msermesth, who wanted established-relationship Steve/Tony infidelity, suggested the circumstances (Tony sleeping with Maya during Execute Program), and waited with exquisite patience for the almost-a-year it took me to bring that to life. I hope this hits the spot!
> 
> Title adapted from “Afraid,” by David Bowie, but the real MVP here is “No Kind Words,” by the Maccabees, which jolted me out of a six month slump and every single lyric of which had to be rejected as a title for being too on the nose.
> 
> Thanks to Ironlawyer for cheerreading, Antrodemus for betaing, and to the wonderful Wynnesome, whose help and support surpasses such terms as ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’—who has been, in fact, an entire goddamn greek alphabet to me.

You are lying on your back in a bed three thousand miles away from your home. You are a fugitive, again, running down the hours on a ticking clock. Your brain is a weapon and you no longer hold the trigger. You are your only hope.

You are lying in a bed, on your back, while your mind runs free. Information arcs across the globe in electric bursts, like synapses firing, like the Earth is one big brain and you the consciousness at its center. You have re-engineered your own humanity, reversed the polarities on the mind-body problem. Your body is the least of what you are and if you spread your selfhood far enough, you can almost pretend that this, here—this bed (not your own) and your body in it—is nothing more than a dream.

This is what you are dreaming:

You are ruining your life.

* * *

Maya gives you a little shove and you fall backwards onto the mattress. Give yourself over to gravity. You could lose yourself in this, you think.

Your hands settle on the curves of her hips. Her hands are harsher. Perfunctory. She pulls your cock out with your pants still on and the buttons of your shirt only half undone.

“Condom?” she asks, but of course you don’t carry them anymore—haven’t needed one in years. She makes a noise—impatience? disgust?—and clambers off you. “Stay,” she says.

You take the opportunity to finish opening your shirt, to push your pants down your hips until you can no longer feel the bite of the zipper. There’s so much you can’t think about so you don’t—focus instead all the power of your overclocked brain on the thought of kissing Maya’s breasts, of cradling their weight in your hands and pressing your face to that soft, fleshy valley.

You hear the opening of drawers, the rustle of someone rummaging through discarded clothing. You hear Maya curse.

You think there is very little room for softness here.

* * *

You’re not actually sure which of you kissed the other first. It’s a question that will haunt you in its irresolution.

Here’s how it starts:

The two of you in a room in your old mentor’s house. Together. Alone. Both fugitives and damn near crawling out of your skins with it. Maya’s got a drink in her hand and you dig your fingernails into your palms to disguise the way they ache in their emptiness.

The plan is set. The trap is laid. Everything over but the waiting. You’ve never really been good at that—never learned to bear inaction gracefully. It pulls at you, stretches you thin and taut and mean, and Maya’s not much better. Every time she looks your way you can see resentment simmering in her gaze like an unwatched pot. Look away too long, and who knows what could boil over?

So there you are, two of the greatest minds of your generation, picking away at each other, small jabs and petty cruelties and somehow all the while drawing closer and closer…

The thing is, there should have been a moment. A decision. Even a surrender. After, you will crawl through reels of memory, the footage perfectly printed on your imperfectly-perfected brain. You will be searching for the tipping point. The moment when one body (yours or hers?) asks a question and the other (hers or yours?) answers, _ yes. _

In a way, it’s an odd thing to fixate on. As if it matters who started it, as if it’s anything more than trivia. You still did what you did. There’s no chain of causality that could free you from that truth—no possible circumstance that could scrub away the stain.

Except.

Except if it was you—if, in that knife’s edge of a moment you were the one to lean in, to close the distance, to bridge the gap between thought and deed, well. That sets you pretty firmly on the road to damnation, but it’s not like you weren’t there already, and at least it means you chose this. At least it means you were in control.

Control is something you no longer have the luxury of losing.

So you will search. And search. And find nothing. Freeze frame: you and Maya, glaring into one another’s faces with barely the space of a breath to separate you. Press play, and somehow, suddenly, you’re kissing. Let the footage roll on and it’s not too much longer before you find yourself here. (On your back. In a bed. Not yours.)

You’re not missing time, exactly. Not like you were when you killed those people (and wouldn’t it be terrible, and wouldn’t it be _ so much simpler _if you were?). It’s a question of metadata. You know what happened. It’s the how and why that escape you.

You don’t kiss much after the beginning, which is probably for the best. Your mouth is dry, sour and mucus-thick. Her mouth tastes like fire and woodsmoke. Tennessee’s finest. The taste of defeat.

* * *

Three months ago, back in your own bed, you wake, heart pounding, the sheets around you drenched with the sweat of nightmare.

Beside you, your lover sleeps fitfully, grunting and twitching. You can tell from the flex of his fingers around the rim of an imagined shield that he is dreaming of war.

You, too, have been dreaming of war. The difference is that when he dreams, his nightmares are all of the past, whereas you—you dream of battles yet to come. These days, when you close your eyes, your enemy wears only one face.

You steel yourself. Tighten your abs, as if that could quell the writhing in your gut. Turn onto your side and wait for your eyes to adjust, for the familiar features to coalesce out of the dark.

Sleep has burnished away all of Steve’s softness. His jaw is clenched; his frown carves deep lines about his mouth and brow. He looks implacable. Unyielding. You try calling to mind his eyes, the way they look when he smiles, but the darkness has leached the color out of more than just the room, and you find you can no longer remember their shade.

It isn’t always like this. Sometimes, on nights like these (and when did you last have a night that wasn’t?), he wakes up first. Often, then, he’ll reach out to you, pull you from your dreaming into the warmth and solace of his arms. Is it cowardice or courage when you turn to him, let him close you in his embrace?

Is it cowardice or courage, when at last you begin to turn away?

* * *

Maya fucks like she’s got something to prove.

She rides you with a focused ferocity, her knees locked like a vice around your hips. They might have left bruises a month ago, back when your skin was still something that could be marked or marred. You raise your hands to her waist and she bats them away.

You’ve always tried to be a generous lover, to give your partners what they’ve wanted of you, but this—this enforced passivity—makes it all worse somehow. More tawdry. Despicable. You shove the thought out of your head before it can take root, but you can still _ feel _it, how it creeps into your body, winching the tendons tighter around restless bones.

Your palms itch where you’ve pressed them against the sheets.

You open your mouth, a question still unformed in your mind. You want so badly to touch, to lose yourself in the intimacy of skin against skin. Surely there’s something more you could give.

“God,” Maya groans, “shut up, shut _ up—” _

You shut your mouth. Let your mind split. It was only out of habit that you remained so long in one place—you are so much more than your body now. One fragment remains in bed, timing the rolling of your hips to Maya’s thrusts, receiving and processing the really very pleasant sensations of heat and pressure around your cock. The rest of you is…

Unbounded. _ Limitless. _Racing through wires, bouncing off satellites, lighter than air, faster than thought.

With one data-stream streak of consciousness, you reach for your Argonauts: your greatest invention (apart from yourself), your vanguard, your vision of a world made safe. You are in low-earth orbit, inside a shielded satellite currently positioned 1,800 miles above Vanuatu. Your armors are just where you left them. Still dormant. Still awaiting the word that will launch them into the uncharted vastness of the future. You sigh in a part of yourself that no longer has access to lungs.

You find your would-be victim in Belgravia, ripping through firewalls like so much wet paper. Karim Mahwash Najeeb, former terrorist, current keynote speaker at the Stark Industries Global Peace Summit, and presumed target of the black hat who’s been hacking your nervous system. It would take less than nothing to kill him right now, a whisper of a thought. You’re lucky your hijacker has a taste for the dramatic; it’s a public execution they want, not a swift and mundane slaughter.

Karim is leaning against the counter of his hotel bathroom, eyes intent on his own reflection as he glides a razor over the contours of his chin. You wonder if he knows about the cameras. It’s not just the Brits that have him under surveillance—you could construct a 3D model of this most domestic of scenes from all the angles in all the quadruple-encrypted feeds you’re tapping.

You think he probably does know. Privacy is the relic of a fast dying world and Karim is, in his way, very much a futurist.

(A thought could have you back in the Tower. No one would ever know. You were the one who designed the security after all.

And it’s not that you _ want _ to, god knows. But you could. It would be so damn _ easy, _and the awareness of it… It isn’t right—isn’t fair: you’re just data now. Ones and zeros shouldn’t be able to feel like this, sandpapered raw with possibility.

Just a thought—)

A sudden burst of pleasure rips you back into your body. You are small and limited and human again. Maya is grinding down, squeezing around your cock like she’s trying to milk the orgasm right out of you. You gasp, a strangled sound, and she pulls up again, shoving back the hair that’s fallen into her eyes. Her eyes are bright, face flushed almost dark enough to disguise the red stripe of the wound across her cheek. She is unspeakably beautiful.

“Can I—” you ask, already lifting your hands again, but Maya jerks her head, a sharp denial.

In a shop in Cádiz, a man argues with a harried-looking cashier. The man pulls out a knife.

In Bangalore, a group of teenagers lounge around the lobby of a hotel, uncaring of the leery looks of the doorman or the ever-watchful eye of the security camera.

In a library in Buenos Aires, a young woman types out a cover letter on one of the public computers. The man next to her is watching porn.

Maya is sweating now. A droplet lands on your chest, another on the dip of your chin. You haven’t broken a sweat in weeks. You’re not entirely sure you’re still capable of it. She lets out a groan and you feel the tightness that precipitates an ending.

On Capitol Hill, the junior senator from Montana sends a backchannel proposal through a private e-mail server: increased farming subsidies for her state in return for a yes vote on a certain controversial bill. If the bill makes it through the House, of course. From the tone of the e-mail, the junior senator from Montana doesn’t find it likely, but then, what does Montana care about superhumans?

In an apartment in Alberta, a woman lies coiled around her lover, naked and sinuous with love. “Smile for the camera,” she coos, working open the buttons on her lover’s shirt.

And now you know, you _ know _you’ve gone too far. If anything is sacred in this most profane of worlds, surely it must be this: this quiet, soft-lit room; this woman and her deft, unhurried fingers; her lover’s hands hovering in the air like a pair of doves before lighting on the woman’s tumbling hair. To come into someone’s home like this, into the privacy of their love—it’s a violation beyond (almost) any of the others and yet—

The lover’s shirt is open now, the flesh beneath bared to the camera’s probing eye. Livid scars underscore each nipple. The legacy of transformation. The woman leans in. Lowers her mouth to her lover’s chest. Kisses the marks like they’re something precious.

You feel yourself beginning to tremble.

“You’re so beautiful,” the woman says, and the awe in her words is like a command interfacing directly with your code because suddenly the memory is playing in realtime—_ “God, Tony,” the deep voice made light with wonder, “you’re so—” _—even as the woman opens her mouth again: “I lo—”

You collapse yourself back into your body just as Maya squeezes down once more, but you must’ve fucked it up somewhere—come back too fast, or somehow wrong, because the sensation seems wan and distant to you, like something glimpsed at the far end of a long tunnel. You are in your body, but you can’t seem to remember how to inhabit it. Sensory data skims across your awareness like clouds reflected over the surface of a lake, transient, impossible to grab hold of, while at the same time at the forefront of your consciousness, the stolen image of the woman in Alberta stutters like a bad disk sector, glitching in eternal, prayerful truncation: “I lo— I lo— I lo—”

You turn inwards, programming directly into your brain. Inject a line of code into your wetware, turn the dial on the pleasure centers up to eleven. You have just enough time to be satisfied with this practical solution to a practical problem before Maya clenches down again and you come, shatteringly.

Maya’s already off you by the time you come back to yourself. She’s rolled onto her side, hand delving between her legs.

A sudden desperation rises within you, bubbling up through the fading bliss of orgasm. “Let me?” you ask, and it’s clumsy—too vulnerable, too _ needing, _but you can’t let this end, not yet, because god, what it’ll mean when it ends— Maya half-turns with a glare of impatience but you’re not above begging now. “Please?”

It’s hot and close between Maya’s thighs. You lose yourself for a while in the warmth and musky wet, in the tremoring of muscle and stuttering staccato of breath. You try to pull back for a moment, to kiss the insides of her thighs but they squeeze tight around you, holding you in place.

“Could you just,” you hear her say.

This is your future. No room for sentiment, for tenderness. Just doing whatever it takes to get the job done.

And it’s almost funny, really, because that’s when it hits you. Face-deep in the crotch of someone who is not your partner, smeared and sticky with her juices. That’s when you realize what you’ve done.

You keep going, of course. You’ve done the worst thing already—nothing you do now can take it back again and anyway, you’ve always prided yourself on being a gentleman. Your mind is blank, grey static, a holding pattern, as you lick and suck with passionless efficiency. Ironically enough, that’s what seems to do it for her, far more than all your fumbling attempts at tenderness, and it’s not too long until she’s quivering and swearing and bucking up into your face.

When it’s over, you get up and go into the bathroom. Lock the door. Fall apart.

* * *

It’s two weeks ago and you and Steve are arguing. There was a fight—a real one, a good, old-fashioned hero versus villain dust-up, life or death in the New York streets. And okay, so maybe there ended up being a little more _ death _than the Avengers have traditionally aimed for, which is what you and Steve are arguing about, but better some lowlife like the Dynamo than the civilian he was threatening, and anyway, you restarted his heart with no damage done so it’s not like it really counts.

It’s a new world. The old way of doing things just isn’t going to cut it anymore. New world with new demands and a new you to meet them. You need to prioritize things like efficiency. No room for sentiment, just doing what it takes to get the job done, and anyway, pretty soon you’re going to have enough red in your ledger that you can’t let yourself get all worked up over a dead man who isn’t even dead.

But it’s not like you can tell Steve that.

You make your excuses. Well, call a spade a spade: you blow him off, but ever since Extremis it’s like he can’t even look at you except to criticize and you can’t— You don’t have _ time _ for this, so yeah, you blow him off and you get the hell out of Dodge and you try not to think that _ this is how it starts. _

Below you, you can hear Luke starting up. He hasn’t exactly proven much of a team player—seems to chafe in the role of rank-and-file Avenger, questioning the hierarchy at every turn. Right now he’s accusing you of being a glory hound, as if— as if you’ve ever— as if you want anything from this except to _ do what needs to be done _ because for better or worse you’re the only one who _ can _and—

Steve tells him to shut up. Which feels good, a little, though it doesn’t do much to soothe the chafed-skin burn where your recent quarrel has rubbed you raw.

Luke, unsurprisingly, declines, and that’s another thing you don’t have time for: Luke’s pissy, half-assed iconoclasm. You’re just about to tune back out except—

Except then Steve says, “Luke.”

Except then Steve says, “He can hear every word you’re saying,” and he’s talking about you.

He’s warning Luke. About _ you. _

And, _ oh, _ you think, something turning over in your chest. For a moment you think it’s your heart, but your heart is as supranaturally hale as the rest of you and, _ oh, _ you think again, and all at once you feel so damn weary, so _ drained, _that your repulsors actually dim and you stutter to a stop in the sky.

You were right. Already without realizing it they’re choosing sides. Falling into line. Defining themselves in opposition. To you.

This is how it starts, after all.

This is how Steve learns to hate you.

* * *

In the bathroom you splash yourself with water from the sink, let it trickle like sweat down your temples and the planes of your cheeks. A cheap simulation of normal biological functioning. The face that stares back at you from the mirror is a stranger’s: bottle-blond hair bleached to the point of breakage, dark stubble already casting an untidy shadow over the throat and jaw. A weak jaw, you think. A weak face. It looks like the face of someone who could fuck around on the love of their life.

Despite the hair, you don’t look anything like him. Not really. His brows are fair, his chin broad, his cheeks vital and firm. And his eyes—his eyes have never looked like that in his life, alight with the guilty panic of a hunter caught in their own trap.

His eyes.

Steve’s eyes.

_ Steve. _

God, you think, and you’re not sure if that’s your gorge rising or just a sob lodged stillborn in the recess of your throat. God, _ god, _what the hell are you going to tell Steve?

Steve, who you haven’t spoken to in— It must be days, now. Steve, who stood by and said nothing as you remanded yourself to federal custody, who couldn’t even be bothered to come and visit you in your analog prison before the Trojan lurking in your brain executed and broke you out again. Steve, who even now is probably strategizing how to _ bring you back in. _

You press your hand to your mouth and shut your eyes. You feel like you should be shaking, but every voluntary muscle in your body is perversely steady. Controlled. Even the nausea you willed into existence has passed. Your body is in prime operating condition: full factory reset, just like— no, _ better than _new.

You could fix that. Insert a script into your brain, corrupt the code, let the perfect, hideous machine of your body fritz and error and bluescreen itself into the ground. You could—

No. No, that’s crazy, that’s—

Fuck.

_ Fuck. _

A memory: Steve’s arms folded, his mouth a thin and unrelenting line, his body angled away from you like you carried something contagious. _ You’re not yourself, _ he said, shaking his head. _ I don’t know who you are anymore. _

You know, now, that Steve was wrong. You are still yourself, if only this far. If no farther.

As much yourself as it takes to take something precious and break it beyond repair.

* * *

Flash forward and you’re trying to strip—you’re still mostly dressed, you haven’t even taken your socks off, and what a fucking joke, to have laid waste to your entire life with your jeans around your ankles and your feet encased in an outsized pair of Sal’s hemp fiber and organic cotton socks—but you keep getting sidetracked by your own hands. You can’t see to stop staring at them. These are the hands of someone who could do this. This is the way the tendons arch as they flex.

It’s so stupid—such a goddamn cliché, but you never thought you were _ that kind of person. _ The kind of person who cheats. Your flaws are manifold and varied, but you’ve never been disloyal. Never _ unfaithful. _You wonder if it’s always been in you, this capacity for treachery, or if it’s yet another gift of your new body.

You lift an uncallused hand to your chest and trace over the places your scars used to lie. Steve loved your scars. You remember the night he took you to bed for the first time, the way he traced his tongue over every crater and fault-line in your skin until you wondered if it was possible to die of wanting someone too much.

“They mean you survived,” Steve told you once, hot and fervent, drunk on love, “they mean you’re _ you, _Christ, you’re so gorgeous, Tony, do that again, mmm.”

It was such a revelation to you, the idea that something could be so manifestly flawed and still be beautiful. Your lovers have always been perfect in your eyes, and Steve the greatest paragon of all.

Steve, who hasn’t made love to you since Extremis made you new. Steve, whose face twisted, whose head turned aside: _ “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.” _You called him a hypocrite and he let the door slam as he left, abandoned you for the badly-upholstered consolations of Sam’s living room couch.

_ “You’re so beautiful,” Steve whispered into the thick, nerveless ridge where your skin met the edges of your artificial heart. _

You stood in front of the mirror then too, the night he left. Touched yourself like you’re touching yourself now, smoothing your hand over perfectly engineered muscle—dry, then, and now gleaming with sink water and borrowed sweat. Back then you dragged your fingers across your collarbone, palpating the skin that Steve flinched from, that Maya will never kiss, that she’ll scarcely even touch.

Such a small, strange sacrifice, you thought then. You will give up so much for this, before the end. For the war you never wanted but know you must win. What does this matter, when it comes down to it?

What could it possibly matter if you don’t get to be beautiful anymore?

* * *

You’d known for some time that war was coming when you realized you’d be its villain. It hurts, now, to think how naïve you were. How you stood, stranded in an age out of legend, looking out over a sea of mud and horses and tattered standards flapping in the wind, and saw another battlefield; how you watched it all unfurl before you—saw with a certainty that surpassed prophecy the fractured ranks, the friends-turned-foes, the unforgiving lines of Steve’s face as he bore down on you like you were a stranger, or less than—and still somehow let yourself believe that, just this once, there wouldn’t _ be _ any villains. A war of heroes only.

But as the weeks rolled into months rolled into years, you found yourself watching Steve more and more. Or, not just Steve—sometimes it feels as if you’ve spent half your adult life with him in your sights—but the way people reacted to him. You saw the way the public looked at him in unjaded moments (even as those moments came less and less frequently), like he was George Washington and Lady Liberty and Santa Claus all rolled into one. You saw the way your fellow heroes turned to him, the way they drank him in, the steadiness of his words, the broad and gleaming truth of him. And you remembered how it felt when you found him on the ice, like the world had been made anew. Like anything could be possible.

And you thought:

A war is just a conflict, a clash of opposing sides. There’s no _ right _ and _ wrong _ woven into the fabric of the universe. _ Good _ and _ bad _are, when it comes down to it, just words; they only become real when you believe in them.

And you thought:

Either every conflict is made of heroes and villains, or none of them are. And for those who need to believe in heroes, well. Given the choice, you know which of you they’ll pick. You can’t even blame them.

Because _ right _ and _ wrong _ aren’t just words to Steve. Steve _ believes _ . And the kind of fucked up thing is that you believe too, you’ve _ always _believed. Just… not enough.

But you’re the futurist, the realist to Steve’s idealist, so you swallow the hurt of it and you make your plans and you set your back to the wind and your face to the world to come. And maybe you’re broken, maybe you’re flawed and wavering and weak, but you’ll just have to fix that. That’s what you do; you fix things. You make them work. You will do what is needed; you will _ make yourself _what is needed. Even if you have to burn everything you are to do it.

You remember what it felt like, the first time you saw him after you returned from that long-ago war with the knowledge of your future like a bomb ticking away in your chest. How he opened his arms to you_ —“Shellhead!” _—relief and joy writ plain on his face for anyone to read. And you remember the grief that welled in you then, tar-black and so thick you thought you could choke.

You think you loved him all the more fiercely after that, a vigorous, implacable ache of a love, constant and relentless in its motions as the hands of a clock. A feeling sowed with the salt-bitter promise of its own ending, the way you’d love anything singular and lovely and cherished and impossible to keep.

* * *

You’re out of the shower and have just finished toweling yourself off when you hear a pounding on the bathroom door. Your heart turns over in your chest, but it’s only Maya.

“I’ve given you as long as I can, but if I don’t pee soon, I’m gonna get a UTI. Not all of us have a genetically-engineered healing factor, you know.”

A UTI. Jesus. The banality of it shakes you to the core.

“Right. Yeah, just let me… uh,” except you can’t actually think of what else you might need to do, so you gather your clothes, tug the towel more tightly around your hips, and open the door.

Maya is standing on the other side, wrapped in a bedsheet. Her hair is rumpled, but the flush of sex has mostly faded from her cheeks, and her lips look oddly pale. Because you haven’t been kissing, you realize. Not since the beginning.

Maya’s eyebrows lift. You’re staring. With a muttered apology, you step aside. You try to summon up a smile, some small sliver of your much-vaunted charm. She just nods in return, like you’re distant colleagues passing in the hallway at some conference. And then you’re stepping back and the door is swinging shut in your face and you’re alone in the sullen silence of the aftermath.

The air still smells faintly of sex so you go to crack open a window. You’re operating largely on instinct—see a problem, provide a solution. The bed is behind you. You don’t want to look at the bed.

You make yourself walk over to it anyway. You don’t get to hide from this. Mechanically, you dress yourself; sit on the edge of the mattress amid the stale debauchery of ruined sheets to pull on your socks, lace up your shoes.

You’ve settled into a sickly kind of numbness, like your brain has been wrapped in asbestos insulation—muffled by slow-creeping poison. You’re looking at your hands again. One of your cuticles is loose. You tug at it until it tears. A bright drop of blood wells from beneath ragged, white-edged skin. You bring it to your lips. Mouth away the blood. When you lower your hands, you see the wound has already healed, the shiny pink of new skin fading before your eyes back to pale. You wonder how much damage you could take before it was too much for even Extremis to handle. If you pulled yourself apart strip by strip, unraveling like a sweater caught on a nail—how fast would you heal then?

A door opens and you jump. Maya again, edged by the sweet, fresh steam of a shower. How long have you been sitting here?

“Hey,” she says.

You open your mouth but you seem to be operating on a lag—it’s several seconds before any sound comes out. “That was— We shouldn’t have— _ I _shouldn’t—” You swallow, turning away from Maya’s bright, attentive stare. She deserves to hear this. You deserve to have to say it. “I’m with someone. I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

You hear her huff out a breath. “Jesus, Tony, I know that. Everyone knows that.”

You look back at her at that. “Then why—?” The thought crosses your mind that maybe this, in some convoluted way, was Maya’s revenge. For putting her away. For breaking her out again. Steve accused you, during your last fight, of playing god. You guess this is one way to pull down a god.

No. No, that’s bullshit. There’s no grand conspiracy here, and even if there was, would it really change anything? Maya’s not responsible for your relationship. 

Maya just shrugs. “I needed it. Seemed like you needed it too. And honestly,” and here her face twists; you watch her wince as it pulls at the wound in her face, “I figured, what does it matter? I’m a wanted felon. You’re an international fugitive. I had a life, you know? Before? I had friends, but I sure as hell don’t see any of them here now. Don’t see that _ someone _ of yours either. So tell me, Tony—” a light in her eyes, savage and empty and just this side of sane “—god’s honest truth, what the fuck does any of it _ matter?” _

And it must matter, you know it must, but standing there before the withering force of Maya’s apathy with your own guilt wrapped around you like the opposite of armor, you can’t seem to think of the words for _ why. _

Maya snorts and hitches up a shoulder and half turns away, and that’s when Sentry crashes through the roof.

Honestly—as adrenaline floods your limbic system, run program _ fight or flight _, suit flying to embrace you like your last friend in the world—it’s mostly a relief.

* * *

It’s two months ago. You have seen the future, its ugly, sneering face, and the future has beaten the ever-loving shit out of you.

Warnings flash red and urgent across the HUD. Your right hand is fractured in eleven places. You’ve got a punctured lung. You’re bleeding internally. The only reason you’re still even upright is that the suit is pumping enough painkillers into your bloodstream to fell a horse. You need medical attention, and soon, or—no use sugarcoating it—your injuries are going to kill you. 

The Avengers are only a press of the identicard away; you’ve got SHIELD on speed-dial. But what you’re thinking about is Maya. Brilliant, ambitious Maya Hansen, a virtuoso whose symphonies are written in genetic code, and Extremis—her magnum opus—wasted on a mad dog like Mallen.

You can do better than that. You can _ be _better than that.

There’s a queasy sort of fluttering in your gut—excitement, or fear, or just the random misfirings of an overloaded nervous system.

Your body is a ruin.

You think, _ I can use this. _

It’s less than a day before that, and you’re sitting in your mentor’s kitchen, drinking his shitty, home-pressed apple juice and listening to all the ways you’ve disappointed him.

Genially, Sal unspools the accomplishments of your life and shows them to be small. You were supposed to be road testing the future, he says. Why aren’t you running the table, he says. You can barely look at yourself in the mirror, can you, Tony? he says. He tells you there’s a dam across your life. 

I tried to inculcate in you a sense of the future, he says, like he thinks he’s failed, and maybe he has, because the future to Sal is something glittering with potential. How can you tell him that you carry the future with you always, strapped across your chest like a dead weight—the unyielding iron clasp of it? 

Once upon a time you awoke in a cave and dreamed you could be better than you were, but to Sal, Iron Man is just a man in a metal suit. Wrestling monsters and punching dragons—a child’s dream of how to build a better world. 

What’s the Iron Man _ for, _Tony, Sal says, and you know what he means.

He means, you need to be _ more. _

It’s four years ago and you have a mission. You’re barely a year sober and still clawing together the pieces of your life, everything that has been taken from you and everything you took from yourself. Now someone has robbed you again. This cannot be allowed to stand.

The other Avengers don’t understand. The armor technology is dangerous. The armor technology is _ yours. _Steve chased you down, all the way to a truck stop in the middle of the Rockies, just to ask you not to do this. You asked him not to get in your way.

And now here he is, standing between you and what’s yours and he’s ready to fight and he’s… distracted. He’s turning his back on you. _ Stupid, _part of you snarls, and for a moment you think you might hate him, for being that honorable, that unthinkingly trusting—for giving you this opening you can’t afford not to take.

It just about kills you to make the call but you don’t hesitate. You meet his eyes, after—you owe him that much. They shine, glassy and hard but still so clear into yours, and you understand that something has broken between you. You can mend something broken, but you can never make it whole. And you understand, too: something broken once can be broken again. The next betrayal will come so much more easily than the first.

It’s already easier than you’d expected, to turn and walk away. 

Five and a half years ago and you’re sloppy with drink, shivering on the sidewalk outside a burning flophouse. Only minutes before Steve was walking out of the door and out of your life. He begged you, he shouted at you, he even hit you, to no avail. You can’t stop drinking. You can’t be the man he wants you to be. You’ve known that for a long time, and now Steve knows it too.

Except then he came back, and he saved you, like he’ll keep coming back, like he’ll keep trying to save you, because that’s the kind of man he is. And maybe you’re three parts drunk, but you’re not too sozzled not to know what kind of man _ you _are.

You’re the kind of man who isn’t a man at all but a sinking ship. You’re the kind of man who was born to go it alone.

There’s a bum standing on the sidewalk near you, come to gape at the fire. His hair is dark—dark enough to buy you time. You swap clothes with him and disappear into the night. 

It’s seven years ago, and Steve is sticking to your side like he’s glued there.

“I just can’t believe,” he’s saying, “I mean… I’ve seen a thing or two, but Arthur? The actual King Arthur? That’s something else, you know?”

Another time you might have laughed, because you’re honestly not sure you’ve ever seen him like this, all awed and wide-eyed and him barely less of a legend than Arthur himself. But now… God, how can you bear to have him here, knowing what you know? (How could you bear to send him away?)

“What was it like?” Steve is asking.

“What, my report wasn’t thorough enough for you?” you say, trying to keep your voice light. 

“Oh.” Steve dismisses this with a grimace and a wave of his hand. A slightly guilty expression crosses his face a moment later, and you really do almost laugh—Steve does love his reports—but he barrels on regardless. “That’s not… I know what happened. I want to know what it was _ like. _ What you _ saw.” _

The word lances like a knife through your heart, but you force yourself to stop, to look up and meet his earnest blue gaze. You take a breath. Open your mouth, and tell him…

The truth.

But not all of it.

So many choices, over the years—so many moments, so many potential turning points. Nothing ever really _ starts _anywhere—the universe and everything in it one ever branching chain of causality, leading back to a single, molten instant of origin. But there are… tipping points. Places where the future solidifies. Where possibility slides into probability and probability crystallizes into certainty. 

Everything you’ve done across the years has led you to this point. But it wasn’t always fixed. It wasn’t always _ sure. _Until something happened—an action taken, a path chosen, and then, somehow, it was. 

Where was your Rubicon? When did you pass your point of no return?

Maybe it was in a cave in Afghanistan, when a man you barely knew saved your life and taught you that the engine of the future is fueled by sacrifice, and that change—real change—always comes hand in hand with destruction.

Maybe it was in the mansion, on a day like any other and yet like no other before it, with Steve reaching out a hand to touch your shoulder, stopping you as you prepared to file out of the briefing room. “I was wondering—” drawing in a steadying breath “—if you wanted to get dinner?” and it couldn’t possibly mean what it sounded like it meant except there was his smile, hesitant and small, and there were his eyes, hope budding in them bright and new, unfurling like leaves at the break of spring— 

Maybe it was that very night, when Steve’s body lay spent and sated and tangled with yours. You pulled him tight to you, feeling the arc of his smile where it curved against your chest, and let yourself imagine that to have was to hold, that everything you ever wanted could ever be yours to keep.

* * *

You painted your legacy in the colors of the setting sun.

You were always going to run out of time.

* * *

You’ve taken out Sentry and everything is, for once, unfolding exactly according to plan. You lead the rest of your pursuers on a wild goose chase with a remote-piloted suit of armor (and try not to count how many friends and colleagues have turned out to hunt you down) while you run your hacker to the ground at Wembley Stadium. And there you are, face to face with the man who’s made you a murderer, only it turns out he’s not a man at all but just some kid who’s been pointing you like a gun at his daddy issues, and he’s just telling you about the dead man’s switch he’s implanted in your brain when— 

—and you should have heard the order, should have done something, should have _ known, _but there are so many people, so much input lagging your processor, and somewhere in the distance a rifle cracks— 

—and now Yinsen’s son is lying dead on the pavement and you feel, for the first time, the Trojan executing in the back of your brain, overriding admin privileges, no write access— 

So now your Argonauts, the one-and-a-quarter-billion dollar global defense system you’ve spent the past six weeks of your life perfecting, are on a rampage and you’re racing from hotspot to hotspot across the globe thinking you might actually be kind of a lousy futurist, because you really should have seen this coming. 

You take out the rogue armors one by one, and you’re almost laughing, because god, what a screw up. What a collosal fucking waste. You’re not working alone, of course—little details like “wanted fugitive” have a tendency to fade away in the heat of necessity—but every time, it’s your plan that finally puts the rogue down. Every time, you’re the one delivering the killing blow.

And sure, maybe you have some inside information, but still it’s… gratifying, in a way, in the midst of all this disaster. You did what you set out to do. Project Argo would have _ worked, _if it weren’t for some kid exploiting a security flaw you didn’t even know existed.

So obviously you need better security—tighter controls, no stone left unturned, but beyond that… 

Maybe you can do this, after all.

Maybe you can finally be _ enough. _

Except then the comm crackles to life, and the voice in your ears—you haven’t heard that voice in days, rough now with exertion and the stress of battle but still so familiar, still so deeply, agonizingly loved: “Tony, this is Steve. We need you in Times Square, stat.”

And just like that all your visions of the future go up in smoke. It is so strong, even now, even after everything: the drive that has propelled you through most of your adult life. _ Steve needs you. Get to Steve. _Never mind everything you’ve done. Never mind everything you’ve yet to do.

You’re less than three minutes out when the Avengers stop responding. Fear begins to pound like a second heartbeat in your chest. 

Times Square is a war zone, all twisted cars and ruined buildings and shattered infrastructure. You’re ripping through news footage and security feeds while Spider-Woman reads you in, but the damage is too great—too many blindspots for even your many-faceted eye. Luke’s out cold, she tells you. Wolverine is down. And Steve?

“Follow the carnage.”

You find him in the rubble, slumped over, battered and groaning. He’s clearly clinging to consciousness through sheer force of willpower, but still awake. Still miraculously alive. The rush of relief that hits you then is so bright, so heady and overwhelming that you forget for a moment that all of this is your fault. Trust him to outlast the guy with invulnerable skin and the guy with adamantium bones, the crazy, stubborn, magnificent bastard, Steve, _ Steve— _

Which is right about when the physical manifestation of your own hubris slams into you like the fist of god and knocks you clean out of the sky.

So now you’re in close combat with a machine you designed to take down the Hulk, which isn’t great, and what’s worse, it’s anticipating your every move. Because your subconscious is operating it, of course, and that’s when you know how to take it down—how you could’ve taken all of them down, if only you’d thought of it, if only you’d dared to follow through.

Which you won’t, of course. Even if it is kind of funny, if you think about it. You guess it’s one way of circumventing your destiny. And at least that way, you wouldn’t have to tell Steve… 

Doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. You’ll find a way. You always find a way.

The Hulkbuster reaches out and snatches up Steve in one massive hand. You hear him swallow back a shout of pain, watch his legs dance uselessly in the empty air. See the light refract off gleaming crimson and gold as the hand begins to squeeze.

In that moment, you don’t even hesitate.

You don’t think about the future; you don’t think about responsibility. It is the best, most exquisitely selfish thing you have ever done and it is so, so easy. Like flicking a switch. All you have to do is reach inside yourself and turn off the light.

Your heart stops.

It doesn’t hurt, because that is a kindness you’ve given yourself. You’re looking right at Steve when you do it—another kindness, and maybe one you don’t deserve but you’re not thinking about “deserve” now. You’re dying and you want his face to be the last thing you see.

_ I love you, _you think, and the world goes black.

. . .

. .

.

* * *

You come back to yourself in pieces. First, a disjointed series of sensations—cool air, the astringent sweetness of antiseptic, the faint hum of machinery, the coarse smoothness of cloth stretched tight across a set of toes—_ your _toes, you amend as your sense of proprioception comes back online. Memory arrives in discrete fragments which gradually mass into a coherent narrative.

That’s right. You died.

Huh.

Looks like it didn’t stick.

You flex your feet, testing the tension of the sheets—dart your tongue out to taste your lips.

A voice, deep and parched, cracked like desert earth: “Tony.”

It all slams back into you at once with such visceral force that for one, blessed moment, you think your heart’s actually stopped again. You _ know _that voice.

Oh god.

You’re not ready for this.

You open your eyes.

Steve is sitting by the side of the bed. His mouth is thin and tight, his posture hunched. He’s still wearing his uniform. You wonder distantly how long he’s been there. Then you remember that you’ve got actual superpowers now, and you reach out with your mind and call up your medical records. You’ve been out for eleven hours. Apparently it took thirty-seven minutes of continuous CPR to restart your heart.

So much effort.

They should have left you to rot.

The guilt feels like an animal trapped inside you, writhing and clawing, desperate for escape. You would have died for this man—you _ expected to die, _ but you can’t— You don’t know how to sit in a room with him, so close, you can count the creases by his eyes, you can smell his _ skin, _ you can’t do this, you _ can’t— _

But you have to say _ something, _so you open your mouth and you choke it back and you choke it back and you say, “Hey,” and don’t say, “handsome,” or “babe,” or “beloved,” or any one of the myriad easy endearments that are no longer yours to use, that will never be yours again.

Steve’s shoulders drop, mouth pulling in a helpless parody of physical pain. “God, Tony, I really thought—”

He cuts himself short. Presses a curled fist to his mouth and reaches out to take your hand.

Only at the very last moment can you bring yourself to pull away.

Steve’s face blanks, the way it does when he’s struggling with some complex emotion. His hands drop to his lap and he shifts—restless, uneasy—in his chair. “I know things have been— lately, I mean, I know we haven’t— _ I _haven’t—”

He grimaces, eyes falling shut. Passes a hand across his face, half turning away.

God, this is hard for him—so agonizingly, unbearably hard. You’ve seen this man deliver impromptu speeches that could rally an army on the brink of desertion, and here he is, sputtering out false starts like they’re being cut out of him, like every word has a price paid in blood. He’s torturing himself, trying to make things right between you, and there’s no _ point, _ he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know what’s coming, he doesn’t know _ what you’ve done. _

“What I’m trying to say is—”

“I slept with Maya,” you interject.

The confession seems to hang in the air, defiant of gravity. You feel oddly light, distant and floaty. Not relief. Shock, maybe.

Steve’s mouth is open. As you watch, heart beating in triple time, he reels it shut. A crease appears between his brows, and whatever you thought this moment would be like, this is worse, because he’s not stupid, he’s never been stupid, but it’s like he’s translating from a language half-remembered and mostly forgotten, and you know, then, that until this moment it never once occurred to him that you might do this. That’s how much he trusted you. That’s what you’re pissing down the drain.

You lie perfectly still and force yourself to watch microexpressions twitch their way across his face, as he takes in what you’ve said, as he reshapes his model of the world into one where you could do—_ have done _ something like this. You feel a sharp tug between your ribs—if you were standing, you think you might have stumbled. It’s your future, pulling at you, dragging you one step closer to war.

And then—

You’ve braced yourself for his anger. Anger has always lain at the very heart of him, as much as his ideals, as much as his kindness and his determination and his hope, and Steve’s core has always been bedrock. His rage will be elemental, the earth’s righteous fury, and you will lie there and you will take it, because Steve’s anger—Steve’s hatred—is nothing more than you deserve.

Somehow, it never really occurred to him that you could hurt him. Not like this. (_oh god, oh god, not like this)_

But it’s as if you’ve struck at the faultlines of him. Steve’s face seems to crack open; all his tension, all of his painstaking composure crumbling away in an instant.

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asks, and his voice is wet.

It’s a moment before you can find it in yourself to speak. All you can think is, _ it’s not supposed to go like this. _

It never ceases to surprise you, how easily he can read you at times, because his face darkens then. Here, at last, is Steve’s anger, that tight bitter set around the corners of his mouth. You focus on that, and avoid looking at his eyes, the way they glitter, pink and raw with unshed tears. 

“So that’s it, huh? Couldn’t bring yourself to end things, so you found a way to get me to do it for you?”

_ No, _ you want to argue, _ that’s not right, _except… isn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what you’ve done?

You say nothing. 

“I can’t be here,” Steve says abruptly. “I can’t— I thought you were _dead, _I thought you killed yourself— and now you’re telling me— Jesus.” He shoves himself to his feet, crosses the room in a few strides. In the doorway he pauses, opens his mouth as if to say something more. Then he closes it again and disappears down the door. Numbly, you track his progress down the hallway through the security cameras. As you watch, he stops in his tracks and spins ninety degrees, drawing back his fist back as if to strike the wall. He stands poised there for a heartbeat, like the personification of wrath. Then he sways forward, seeming to crumple in on himself; his upraised hand flattens itself gently against the wall. 

You pull back abruptly, reeling back long strands of self from where they’ve entangled themselves in the hospital’s computer systems. Faintly, you hear footsteps retreating in the distance, so you shut down your senses as well, lock yourself deep within the impregnable fortress of your body.

This is the heart of you now, this bleak, black solitude, the sucking maelstrom of loss and shame contained within your chest, your body a perfect, untouchable prison for your all too flawed, all too touchable soul. For a moment, you indulge yourself with a fantasy—of letting yourself fall into that abyss. What it would be like to give up. Give in. To _ stop. _The rending comfort of oblivion. 

You take a moment to familiarize yourself with the shape of this reality, the internal landscape of your brave new world. Like relearning your face in the mirror. Then you lower your walls. Bleed back into your senses. A quick scan of the hospital’s security system confirms what you already know in your bones to be true: Captain America has left the premises.

You take a breath.

The pain of the air entering your lungs is sharp, lonely and cold, like the keening of wind through desert places, but it no longer threatens to bring you to your knees. You can live with this, or at least, you can learn.

So much to do. You’ll need to talk to Nick. To Kooning. Get your assets unfrozen. Remove any shadow of suspicion that might still cling to your name. You’ll need to reach out to Reed, to Bob, to Carol. Repair those cracked alliances, and start building new ones. Peter is loyal. If you can connect with him now… 

You take another breath. This time the pain is almost bracing.

Wake up, Stark. Your future is calling.

Time to rise.

Time to shine.

_ Time’s up. _

Time

* * *

You let the doctors poke and prod and run whatever tests they can think of for another thirty-six hours, and then you check yourself out of the hospital. Technically it’s “against medical advice” but the doctors know as well as you do that there’s no real reason to keep you there. They just want a chance to study you some more. Which is nothing you don’t know how to handle; you’re used to people wanting a piece of you (although usually not so literally; strange, the hunger of this dawning world, where people come for you with scalpels in hand).

So now you’re back at the tower, packing a bag. You have a flight to Washington set to leave in five hours. You’ve got several meetings set up already—some public, some discreet, and one or two entirely off the record—and one part of your mind is industriously arranging more: composing e-mails, making overtures. It’s the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday. Not really your scene these days, but that’s part of the point. The price of political success is a certain amount of schmoozing. You need to be getting out there. To see and be seen. You need—

A few days. Maybe a week. You’ve checked the logs: Steve hasn’t been back to the tower since your confrontation at the hospital. No doubt he’s avoiding you—which is, you remind yourself as your heart clenches like a fist in your chest, something to be grateful for. A mercy for you both. But if you make it clear that you’ll be elsewhere, well. That should give him time to gather his things. Make his arrangements. As neat a severance as you could hope for.

God only knows when you’ll see him again. On the battlefield, maybe—broken bodies, rubble and mud, cold light gleaming off a hard edge of vibranium as the shield comes up, swings down, down—

Funny, the way thinking of him swallows up everything else. Like lagging software, out of date and bloated with the history between you. Put those thoughts aside and look how smoothly you run. You’re skimming the news, you’re liaising with an Oakland construction company to repair the damage to Sal’s roof, you’re running through the key points of tomorrow’s DoD meeting, you’re triple-checking the math on your latest repulsor upgrade, you’re—

Pulling a crumpled wad of fabric from the back of a drawer. Shaking out the creases.

A white star winks from a broad field of blue.

The shirt slips through fingers gone suddenly lax. Extremis goes odd for a second, a torrent of hexadecimal numbers streaming across your mind, cataloguing every minute shift in shade and apparent hue as the fabric slithers and folds beneath the shadow of your hands.

Stupid, to be so thrown by a fucking t-shirt. Of course you’ve got a few of Steve’s clothes, pilfered for sleepwear in happier days. You just haven’t worn them in so long, you forgot—

It’s a _ problem _ is what it is, the way he looms so large in your mind, eating up memory, overloading your servers, running your processors into the ground. You need something: a patch, an update, an override. It’s impairing your functioning; you can’t _ win a war _like this.

You’re still blinking hex codes from your eyes, which is probably why you don’t give much thought to the knock that sounds twice at your door.

“Come in.”

It’s probably just Jarvis, or maybe one of the Avengers, or—

“Tony.”

It’s not Jarvis.

It’s as if the world has spun away under your feet, leaving you floating in empty space. How foolish of you, how woefully naïve to imagine that there could be any such thing as a _ clean break. _You’re feeling lightheaded—a pointless psychosomatic reaction. Surely you should be beyond that by now.

Heart jackhammering in your chest, you turn.

Steve looks… like shit, frankly, his features drawn, his posture tight, one hand on the door, the other jammed awkwardly into the front pocket of his jeans. But he doesn’t look angry. You find yourself, not for the first time, at a loss for words. Your prescience has failed you. You don’t know what to do if he’s not here to fight.

Why _ is _he here?

His eyes slide from you to the suitcase lying open on the bed. _ Your _bed—yours and his. A thousand nights of memories on those sheets. Can he feel them as you do, roiling like ghosts, choking-thick upon the air?

“Going somewhere?” he asks.

You mean to say something about Washington—meetings, galas, responsibilities, a perfectly accurate and entirely dishonest answer any politician would be proud of—but somehow what comes out is, “I thought it would be best.” You manage to stop talking then, or at least, your throat closes up, which amounts to the same thing.

You have a terrible, self-destructive urge to reach out and touch him, the smudge-edged realness of him, the ink-daub circles beneath his eyes, the stubble dulling the line of his jaw. The realest thing in your digital world, the _ now _amidst the memories and the maybes, the tenuous futures and the trembling regrets.

_ Steve. _

It won’t always be like this, seeing him. It _ can’t _always be like this. It’s only that the wound is so fresh, and the knowledge of your own guilt still so sharp in your mind. You’ve a lifetime’s experience learning about scars: the ways they heal and the ways they don’t. This will get easier, with time. 

His gaze is intent on yours, his expression unreadable. “Give me time to pack my bags, is that it? How long do I have? A week? Less?”

It takes you a moment to process what he’s saying, because the way he’s saying it— Like it’s a deadline, like it’s some kind of ultimatum, rather than a kindness, than one final courtesy…

“I’m not—” you splutter, rub a hand across your face. “I’m not _ kicking you out _. I just thought…”

“And what if you thought wrong?” Steve’s voice is even, reasonable, like it’s a real question. Are you wrong in reading something harsher—edged—into the tilt of his head, his flat stare, the sideways draw of his mouth?

You never imagined he might want to stay. Of course you’re not going to throw him out into the streets. The tower is his home; you’re not going to take that away from him. Not after everything else you’ve taken.

But you can’t both stay here, and if you leave… Such a public concession—a tacit admission of wrongdoing. From a strategic point of view? Unthinkable. To cede Avengers HQ to him, give up the home ground before the battle’s even begun—how could you possibly afford it?

How could you possibly ask him to go?

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I figured.”

_ “Steve—” _you begin, and god, what a blunder, his name in your mouth. It bursts on your tongue like overripe fruit; you have to close your eyes just to process the half-rotten sweetness of it, the way it clings like syrup to the walls of your mouth.

“It is your tower,” Steve concedes after a moment, almost gracious, like he’s giving you something.

“I have other houses,” you say, like an asshole.

What are you _ doing? _

The ghost of a smile flickers across his face. “Yeah, Mr. Money-bags, I know you do.”

Now he’s teasing you. It doesn’t make sense; nothing about this makes sense. The data is a mess, a far-flung scatter graph with no discernable pattern. Out of all the ways you predicted he might respond, none of them looked like this.

You feel something draining out of you, like air from a punctured tire. “What do you want, Steve?” you ask, so tired.

All traces of humor vanish. It’s a moment before he speaks. “I want a lot of things, I guess. I— Can I sit down?”

You shrug, helpless—as if you’re going to stop him?—and he sinks into the easy chair to the left of the night table. You’ve seen him there so often, after a battle or just a particularly difficult day, flipping through stacks of Avengers reports or, less frequently, a newspaper or one of those pulpy fantasy novels he likes so much.

Now he cradles his forehead in one big hand, and sighs. “I guess,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything for a little while. “I guess I was mostly hoping you could answer a question for me.” A bit of old New Yawk has crept into his voice, the way it does in his most unguarded moments. “’Cause I’ve been turning it over and over in my head and I can’t— God knows things have been rough lately and a lot of that’s on me, but what I can’t figure out is _ when.” _

When… Is he talking about you and Maya?

Steve lifts his head. There’s an empty, aching desolation in his eyes, so much worse than tears. “When did you stop loving me?” he asks.

It’s like a punch to the gut, because you _ never— _

Except it might be better—might be kinder to the both of you to let him believe that you have, but something has sharpened in Steve’s expression, like a bloodhound picking up a scent. He’s leaning forward now, a posture not of defeat but of intent, and you know you’ve already given yourself away.

“Then _ why? _Why’d you do it?”

You open your mouth. Close it again. What can you possibly say to that?

Steve waits. Focused. Patient.

“Does it matter?” you try at last.

“It does to me.”

“It shouldn’t.” Frustration leaks in around the edges of your voice. What you’ve done—it’s unforgivable. How can he not understand that?

Why can’t he just let you _ go? _

Except there’s your answer right there, baked into the question, because this is Steve Rogers, and he never gives up, and he never, ever lets go.

“You don’t get to decide that,” he says now, steel in his voice, and then, as silence begins to stretch between you again, “I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question.”

Not unreasonable. Just unanswerable.

You flounder, searching for a response. What do people normally say in circumstances like this?

“It was… a bad situation, and you, you and I, you weren’t— _we _weren’t—” You rake your hands through your hair. “She was there, and everything was so— and I just—” It sounds like you’re making excuses, and you’re not, there are no excuses, you _know_ that, but—

He _ asked _. You don’t know what else to say, don’t know what you can give him except this sad, small sliver of truth.

“She was there,” you say, and force yourself to meet his gaze, if only for a moment.

Steve doesn’t reply straight away, like maybe he’s hoping for something more out of you. Then he casts his eyes down in thought and nods, minutely.

“And that’s why you did it,” he summarizes. “It was a bad situation, and she was there.”

You shrug, half turning away. It’s as good an explanation as any.

“And now, I’m guessing you’ve got a bridge you want to sell me.”

Your eyes snap back to his. He’s smiling slightly, unbelieving and just a little bit sly.

“I’m calling bullshit, Tony. You’ve been in worse situations than that before and you never did anything like this.”

And god, the confidence in his voice, the smug and unwavering certainty. You splay your fingers to keep them from balling into fists. Not even a shadow of a doubt, when he should be calling everything that’s ever between you into question. You want to take that terrible, suffocating faith and rip it to shreds, except you thought you’d already done that. Can’t he see you’re nothing, _ nothing _like he thought you were?

“Well, it’s not like it happened in a vacuum, did it?” you say, fighting to keep the tremors from your voice. “Things have been going downhill for months. You told me I was like a stranger to you, do you remember that? For god’s sake, you wouldn’t even _ touch _me.”

Steve jerks forward in his chair, hands clamping down on the armrests. “Because you were changing! You were changing yourself and you were pulling away from me and I didn’t know how— I couldn’t—”

One corner of your mouth has lifted in a jeering smile. Now your cheek tics with the effort of keeping its place. “People change, Steve. Relationships fall apart. That’s _ life.” _

He breathes in sharply, like you’ve landed a blow. But he doesn’t falter.

“You love me,” he says. An accusation.

You choke on a laugh, because yes, you love him, holy Christ, you love him, love him so much some days you can hardly breathe with it, like it’s too big for your body, like your beating heart could burst right through your skin, and—

“So _ what?” _you spit.

You’re thinking of Maya—_ “Tell, me, Tony, God’s honest truth—” _ You’re thinking of those glad-handing suits in Washington with their backchannel negotiations and their hemming and hawing and their _ “for the public good.” _

You’re thinking of a shield raised high on a broken street and a broken man lying beneath it, waiting for the blow to fall.

“It’s not enough,” your mouth cut and bleeding with the truth of it. “It was never going to be enough.”

Across from you, Steve sits like a statue. His face is blank; only by the minutest motions of his chest can you tell he’s even still breathing.

Maybe you’ve finally done it.

Maybe this is how it ends.

You lick your lips and wonder vaguely if you’ll ever be able to taste anything but salt again.

Then he says, clear and so, so calm, “Enough for what, Tony?”

His voice—its gentleness, its control, its utter lack of surprise—floods like ice water down your spine as, suddenly, sickeningly, you realize just how badly you’ve botched this. You thought he wasn’t here to fight, but this whole time he’s been dodging and feinting, bending the whole of his tactician’s mind to the task, maneuvering you inch by inch until he’s got you exactly where he wants you. This has always been a battle—and it’s one you’re losing.

“Enough for us,” you say, scrambling now, “for you and me to work out in the long run. We’re too different; you have to see that.”

“You’ve been running scared for months,” Steve says, as if you haven’t spoken. “Maybe even longer. I’m sorry it took me so long to see, but I see it now. What’s got you so afraid, Tony?”

“I am not. Afraid,” you bite out but both of you know it for a lie.

“I know you.” The compassion on his face is a terrible thing to behold. He’s leaning in now, closing that carefully manufactured ground. “This is what you do when you’re scared: you push people away. You take on so much and you always think you have to do everything on your own, but I’m here to tell you, you don’t.”

As if he knows, as if he has even the slightest idea—

Your brain is a mess of signals, fight and flight both blaring at once. You can feel the undersuit readying to push its way up through your skin. You suppress the instinct—this isn’t that kind of fight, but god, it _ feels _like one, the way your heart is pounding, the way you keep imagining yourself wracked with non-existent tremors.

“Whatever it is,” Steve says, “we’ll face it together.” His voice rings with earnest conviction, and that—that’s what finally gets to you.

Because you can tell that he really believes what he’s saying. Really believes that he’s just solved all your problems in one fell swoop. Everything is so fucking simple to him. You think you’ve loved that, at other times, in other places, but here, now, all you can think is that this will be what wrecks you.

Steve Rogers is a rock, but the future is a tide, and a rock can cut through the tide but it can’t stop it. Not ever.

“There’s not going to _ be _a together.” It’s as if another force entirely has seized control of your mouth, the words flooding out as from a dam unstoppered. “That’s the whole point. The thing that’s coming? It’s going to break us, Steve, break us right in two, and by the time it happens, you won’t even care.” And it must be true that you can’t control this, because surely you would never have spoken the next words aloud of your own volition, the heart-caught whisper of them: “You’re going to hate me.”

Surprise wipes the furrows from Steve’s brow. “I could never hate you, Tony.”

He doesn’t mean it as a cruelty—probably he even believes it—and somehow that makes it all the worse, because you know, you _ know _ it’s a lie. You’ve seen it, nearly every night now, the moment you close your eyes and even creeping into your waking hours: the cold rage in Steve’s eyes, the cut-glass curl to his lip. He’s halfway there already without even realizing it; he’s _ repulsed _by you, by what you’ve done to yourself, and he might not remember that just now but you sure as hell haven’t forgotten.

Somehow without your noticing he’s shifted to the very edge of his seat. Now he stands, slowly, broadcasting every movement.

“Just talk to me,” Steve says, and he’s stepping forward, he’s reaching out a hand—

The backs of your knees slam into the side of the bed as you jerk backwards; you have to grab at the bedpost just to keep from overbalancing.

Steve pauses, eyes raking over you, taking in your posture, your heaving chest.

Something wild and lawless is surging through your veins. Just let him come closer, just _ let him— _

Steve bites down on his lip and puts up his hands. “I’m sorry,” he says, angling himself so he’s no longer blocking you in, and in that moment you come as close as you ever have to hating him, for his consideration, for his perseverance. For being so _ good, _still, in spite of everything.

Before you’ve even had time to think about it you’ve launched yourself forward, crowding him, getting right up into his space. Sneering up the slope of the few startled inches between your face and his: “You want to know what’s coming?”

You can see his jaw firm, almost watch the words forming behind his eyes, the steadfast resolution: _ Tell me. _You don’t give him the chance to speak.

“It’s _ war, _ Steve, and it’s nothing like we’ve ever seen before. Because this time, there is no ‘us versus them.’ It’s us versus _ us: _all of us, the entire superhuman community at war with itself, and you and me?” The proximity is rapidly becoming unbearable—you can feel his breath, the memory of heat against your lips, but you don’t let yourself move away, not until you’ve delivered the final blow: “We’re on opposite sides.”

“You can’t know that,” Steve argues as you step back, but he sounds, for the first time, uncertain. His eyes sweep restlessly back and forth across your face, like it’s a book he’s struggling to read.

Despite yourself, you feel a twinge of pity. You remember what it was like, to face this truth for the first time.

“I’ve seen it,” you say, with a simplicity that is as close as you dare come to kindness. “I’m a futurist; that’s what I do. And I know what we’ll be fighting over and I know _ you, _Steve.”

That, somehow, is the hardest admission of all. If you knew him less well—understood him less—maybe it wouldn’t have come down to this. Maybe you could’ve kept on in ignorance for a few more weeks, a month, before— _ before— _

“I know your principles and I know what you believe in and I know you will always, always do what you think is right.” You breathe in deep, hoping against hope that, whatever he’ll think of you in the days to come, just now, just in this moment (and maybe, years in the future, looking back over dust and ashes long since settled) he’ll understand. “And I have to do the same.”

“And so you’ve just— just _ decided—” _Steve presses his lips together; his fingers clench where they hang at his sides. “You can’t be sure. We’ve stopped worse futures from happening before. We can still—”

_ “Steve,” _and you know he must be even more affected than he wants to let on, because he stops at once. “It’s already started.”

The silence between you pulls long and thick as you turn away. You place your hands on the bedpost, fingers laced, and rock on the balls of your feet, let yourself lean until your knuckles go white with the pressure.

“All we could ever do was postpone the inevitable.” The suitcase lies open on the bed like an empty mouth, wordless and gaping. “There’s nothing left here to save. I’m sorry.”

Your eyes are growing wet. You lift your head to try and blink away the moisture, and then, when that doesn’t work, tilt your chin all the way back so your tears catch the light—let the refractions dazzle away your sight.

From behind you, you hear, very low: “I think maybe you don’t know my principles as well as you think.”

Despite yourself, you give a watery chuckle. Of course he’s still arguing. Stubborn to the last. You had a good run, didn’t you, while it lasted. There is sweetness here, even in the heart of pain, if you can find it—if you can learn how to grasp it.

“I think,” Steve says a little louder, “the problem with spending too much time staring at a problem is that you stop being able to see it clearly.”

“Yeah?” you say, speaking into the light. “And what is it you think you see?”

“Another way.”

You scoff, scraping a hand across your face. The blade of your palm drags a thin smear of snot down into your mustache.

“You’re not going to be able to sit this one out, Steve. None of us will. Not this time.”

“Tony. When have you ever known me to sit out a fight?”

It’s the chiding in his voice that gets you, like he still doesn’t _ get it, _like he thinks the intimacy between you is still alive and breathing.

“In that case,” you say, rounding on him, “there are only two choices. There’s one side, and there’s the other, and we’ve already established that that’s not going to _ be _a choice. Not for us.”

Steve’s head is tilted to one side. “And what about a third option?”

“There is no third option!” Christ, you’d have better luck talking to a brick wall, except—

“I think there is,” Steve says simply, and takes a step forward.

For some reason, your breath catches.

Another step. There’s something almost hypnotic about the way he moves—like a swimmer carving through water, a deliberate, powerful grace. About his voice, its low, thrumming tone. About his eyes. That depthless, impossible blue.

“I think there’s you—” and by the time you realize you should have stopped him, he’s already taken your hand, “and me,” pressing it briefly to his chest, then holding it in the space between you as he continues. “What if— what if _ that’s _what I choose? What if I choose us?” His voice is fierce. “What if I choose working together and not letting it tear us apart, no matter what? What about that, Tony?”

It’s gibberish. A pipe dream.

“You _ can’t,” _you start to tell him, but the grip of his hand in yours—so tight you can feel his pulse, the steady surging of his blood. A lifeline.

And—it’s like something clicks into place in your head, because suddenly you can see it, spooling out recklessly before you: another future. All of Steve’s stubbornness, his loyalty, his unyielding conviction turned not to some nebulous point of principle, but to _ you, _ both of you—to your relationship. Planting himself like a tree by your side and refusing to be moved. _ “Whatever it is—” staring out into a sea of cameras and microphones and urgent, questioning faces, his hand in yours, fingers intertwined “—we’ll face it together.” _

You’d still fight—of course you would—

_ Steve slamming a folder shut, sweeping it from the table, papers startling like flies into the air—“Dammit, Tony, this is wrong!” _

—only this time—

_ Steve turning to you, shoulders rolling back, face settling into lines of determination. “What can we do to fix it?” _

“Bet you I can,” Steve retorts, the faint glimmerings of a smile hovering about his lips.

You realize your hand is still folded in his and snatch it away. “I hid things from you! I lied to you, I— Jesus, Steve, I _ cheated _on you! You can’t possibly—” 

And yeah, maybe he thinks he could—maybe he’d even be stubborn enough to try it, but sooner or later, it would all fall apart. He’d never really be able to trust you—how could he?—and over time, with every compromise, every bit of himself bartered away to try and hold together your already shattered relationship, that distrust would stretch into resentment, into anger, into loathing. No matter what, this ends with him hating you.

It _ has _to.

Steve lifts the hand that, until moments ago, was holding yours, and clasps the back of his neck. “Well. Nobody said it’d be easy.”

As you gape at him—the genius, the futurist, at a loss for words—he continues.

“I— I can’t pretend I’m thrilled about… you and Maya_ , _or—” a shadow of pain moving across his features “—or about the fact that you decided to destroy our relationship rather than have a single damn conversation with me, but.” He looks you square in the eyes. “The way I see it, it comes down to this: I love you, and I think what we have is worth fighting for. The question is…” His mouth works briefly; his hands clasp and reclasp. “Do you feel the same?”

Love, love, of course you love him, but it’s not a question of love. It’s the future, _ your _ future, it’s— Damn it, it’s everything you are. You’ve carried this around inside you for so long, felt your tissues toughen and deform around the unrelenting wound of it—you’ve shaped yourself, _ changed _yourself, all to meet this future and—

(Good god, the things you’ve _ done—) _

—and now he’s here, asking you to throw it all away for, what? an empty page? for good intentions, and hope?

There are moments when the future solidifies. When possibility slides into probability and probability crystallizes into certainty. But there are moments, too, where the future hangs in the balance, teetering between one eventuality and another.

Steve leans forward. There’s a spark of that old recklessness in his gaze, the way he used to look right before he threw himself off skyscrapers, expecting you to catch him, and you find yourself remembering the first rule of flying:

It starts with a fall.

“C’mon, Shellhead,” Steve whispers, voice thick with something you don’t dare to name. “Take a chance.”

There are moments when everything changes.

That’s the problem with predicting the future: you can never really track all the variables. However advanced your model, there’s always the possibility of something unforeseen, knocking your carefully ordered world askew.

The other, deeper problem, of course—and where along the way did you allow yourself to forget it?—is that the world just _ doesn’t work like that. _Whatever your engineer’s soul might want to believe, Newton’s clockwork universe—it’s slick, mechanized inevitability—is a lie. Reality, at its very heart, runs on chance. On probability. On uncertainty, and randomness, and, just maybe, a choice.

There is a man in a cave, feeling his tattered heart beat stubbornly in his chest, realizing he could be so much more than what he’s made of himself. 

There is a man on the streets, ragged and half-frozen, clutching a newborn baby in his arms and thinking, maybe life is something worth fighting for.

There is a man who has made himself over a thousand times, standing in a bedroom with his heart in his throat and the future in his hands.

Deciding.

You take a breath.

“What do you know about the SHRA?”

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: established relationship infidelity (Tony cheats on Steve with Maya), sex as self harm, self destructive ideation, brief nonconsensual voyeurism
> 
> Find me on tumblr (along with a rebloggable post for this story) [here](https://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/post/188553972280/fic-your-face-in-tomorrow)!
> 
> If you enjoyed/suffered/felt a thing, please consider leaving a comment, however small--they really do mean the world. 💕


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